Roadmap for IT Research on a Heritage-BIM Inter-operable Platform within INCEPTION

Within the EU research project titled INCEPTION, a Heritage-BIM Interoperable Platform will be developed and used to store all cultural heritage-related data. This platform will strongly depend on Semantic Web and Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies that drive the ‘INCEPTION Time Machine’ where a time dimension will show how the cultural heritage evolves in association with its built and social environments. This paper describes the technical research challenges associated with this platform. An initial research activity is dedicated to review the state-of-the-art in BIM, H-BIM, HGIS, as well as the utilization of Semantic Web for enabling semantic search and enrichment of Cultural Heritage information by the end-users. The subsequent research activity will focus on the integration of 3D point-clouds and sensor data with the H-BIM. Various data will be stored on the H-BIM platform and made available via APIs and web interfaces. The platform itself will contain services for geometric shape recognition and semantic query. Finally, the AR and VR applications as well as semantic searches, the Time Machine / 4D Viewer component, and a semantic enrichment application will be made available for the end-users and third-party developers alike.